Wasting away in DANgaritaVILLE…

August has been a difficult month.  On the negative side, our contractor of five years decided that our house would make a better party venue than his own house, and an unauthorized invasion of rednecks was the result.  This fiasco followed right on the heels of our mantlepiece disaster, where the guys who were instructed to hand-strip one of the original 1880s mantlepiece decided to disregard our instructions and put it in the heated stripping tank instead. Needless to say, it is now in many pieces in various states of expansion and shrinkage, and wholly destroyed.  Add that to the wallpaper re-do whereby the anaglypta wallpaper went up in the master bedroom, had too much paint applied with the primer coats and had to be peeled off and new anaglypta ordered and re-hung.  In addition, we were welcomed home to a dark green pool because the teenage boy next door who had been adding the chlorine had a fit of teenage laziness.  Combine that with the frantic phone calls from neighbors reporting a break-in at our project at #841.  That eventually turned out to be a contractor who left the front door wide open and forgot to set the alarm, but would not own up to having done so out of fear of getting fired.  And as if that were not enough, we ended up with a cracked windshield that occurred on our trip down as we are fielding calls from the nighbors about the “break-in” at #841.  Oh, and did I mention that we had an earthquake and a hurricane all in the same week while my 87 year old mother-in-law was staying with us. 

To say that we were feeling a little stressed is an understatement.  It seemed as though a dark shadow was sucking all of our happiness and a negative vibration was running through all of our affairs.  All this angst, frustration, anger and anxiety simply needed a release somehow and a reversal of the negative wave that was washing over us.

This calls for a DANgaritaVILLE party.  We try to do as many of these gatherings as we can throughout the warmer seasons.  It all started with a childhood memory and a slushie machine. My husband, Tom, grew up having to do without many things that most people take for granted.  South Florida was unforgivingly hot in the summertime in the mid 1960s, especially since his family could not afford such a luxury as air conditioning.  As a young boy he would collect the glass bottles along the side of the road and redeem them for a few pennies each until he had enough money to buy an ice-cold slushie and some Mary Jane candies.  He always dreamed of having his own slushie machine at home so he could have an ice cold slushie whenever he wanted.  Fast forward many decades and he is now the proud owner of a commercial Bunn machine that has two separate hoppers holding 3 gallons of frozen delicious beverages each.  Margaritas are almost always on one side, with some non-alcoholic frozen drink on the other, or some new recipe I might be trying out.  The frozen Key Lime Pie martinis were a hit one time, though proved to be way too alcoholic, and the frozen Lemon Drop MarTinas are a frequent guest drink.

This weeks DANgaritaVILLE was specially themed to chase away the bad spirits of the month of August, and poised to welcome September 2011 with the hope and promise of a new month bringing positive vibes.

As friends and neighbors began to arrive, we settled into the familiar pattern of greeting old friends, and being introduced to new people in the neighborhood as well as meeting some Danville natives who are in town visiting relatives for the Labor Day Weekend.  The Margaritas were flowing, and the dishes brought by others were quickly filling up space on the kitchen island.  A few people wanted to see the progress we had made in the master bedroom, and some of the new folks wanted to see what we had done with the place.  The nice thing about these neighborhood parties is how easily everyone gets along, how much friendship and happieness and comraderie there is in the air with these parties.  One thing about living in the historic district, is that there is a wealth of people from different backgrounds, political views, socioeconomic backgrounds, and experiences, but they all have one thing in common.  They all love the historic distric and the homes which inhabit that district, and thereby make great efforts to get to know one another and to exchange ideas and experiences.   If you haven’t figured it out by now, the most powerful asset to the historic district is the people who live there. they are the main reason that we come down every other weekend, labor so hard, and put so much of our heart and soul into these buildings.  At the end of the day we have the friendship of the most amazing group of people in the world, and that is what keeps us coming back despite all of the negative stuff that can happen when you restore an old house in a town politically and economically challenged.  Those people give me the energy and the happy glow that keeps me so in love with this town despite its warts.

A margarita toast to the people of the historic district!

Our “extended family” in Danville…